Ukraine will lose Avdiivka, Zelensky’s former aide predicts

A former Ukrainian presidential adviser has warned that Kyiv’s forces will not be able to hold on to Avdiivka, the Donetsk town where fierce fighting is raging.

Until January 2023, Oleksii Arestovych was a communications adviser for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before resigning after he faced criticism for saying that a Russian missile that hit a building in Dnipro on January 14 had been shot down by Ukrainian air defense forces. After Ukrainian lawmakers called for his dismissal, Arestovych apologized for his remarks but since then has criticized the Ukrainian counteroffensive which started in June.

This month, Russia launched a major offensive on Avdiivka, which lies on the front line in eastern Ukraine and is considered the gateway to the city of Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russia and its proxy forces since 2014. Fighting has intensified in recent days with British military intelligence saying that there have been a high number of Russian casualties without mentioning Ukrainian losses.

But in an interview posted by a Russian-language Telegram channel that reports about the war in Ukraine, Politika Strani (Politics of the Country), Arestovych gave a pessimistic take on Kyiv’s hopes. “My forecast is sad. I am sure that there is a high probability we will lose Avdiivka.

“The situation is tragic. All the military know that troops from the southern front have been transferred to Avdiivka,” he said “This means goodbye to the southern offensive. The Russians are withdrawing three armies from near Kupiansk for Avdiivka, and we understand that they will most likely push through,” he said.

Arestovych’s downbeat assessment contrasts with the views of some Western analysts who believed Ukraine could hang on in Avdiivka where Russian forces have suffered high equipment and troop losses and faced challenges conducting frontal mechanized assaults. The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, cited a Kremlin-affiliated milblogger on Sunday as discussing difficulties that may be contributing to a “positional deadlock” for Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka.

Arestovych said that if Avdiivka were taken, it would be “a verdict on the system” of Ukraine’s military which would see it lose its “seventh city in a row.” Despite previous Ukrainian military successes in which Russian losses are touted, “it always ends the same way,” he added.

Ukraine’s forces retook the southern city of Kherson last November, but there has been slow progress from Kyiv nearly five months into this year’s counteroffensive aimed at recapturing Russian-occupied territory. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s General Staff has said its forces are fending off Russian offensive operations across other parts of the front.

“The Russians evidently saw a weakness and opening in Ukrainian positions in Avdiivka and went for it,” Vuk Vuksanovic, associate at the London School of Economics thinktank, LSE IDEAS, told Newsweek.

“This opening was evidently generated with heavy Ukrainian casualties from the unsuccessful counter-offensive. While the Russians have losses, it is a much more important question what the Ukrainian losses are given the Russian preponderance in artillery.”

Arestovych is a former officer of Ukraine’s Chief Directorate of Intelligence and his downbeat assessment of Kyiv’s chances comes on the heels of his criticism of Ukraine’s counteroffensive that he gave in a lengthy post on X (formerly Twitter).

On October 15, he criticized the resources Ukraine expended in fighting for Bakhmut which is “nothing but a modest operational and tactical success.”

He also condemned “strategic mistakes” in Kyiv’s domestic and foreign policy, adding that the war was at an “impasse” in which “the Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them.”

Newsweek has contacted the Ukrainian Defense Ministry for comment.

Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project.